Audio communications between people, directly, through telephones or cellular phones always involves the parties respective hearing and talking capabilities. Intelligibility of a conversation has always been dependent both on the hearing and talking ways and capabilities. Historically, the trend has been to try and find technological remedies to the hearing impairment part, as there was no way to control the talking side. However, the prevalence of the cellular phone in our day-to-day life opens a new era in audio communications where the goal of maximal intelligibility by adapting the hearing of one party to the talking way of the other party may be optimized.
A Hearing-aid enhances hearing by amplifying voices detected by a sensitive microphone, while bringing an individual's reduced hearing response at various audible frequencies, to the level of hearing of a normal person, which is defined roughly as the ability to hear sounds on an absolute scale of 0 to 25 dB at 250 Hz to 6-8 kHz. The modified sound is then delivered into the user's ear canal. Hearing-aids also use various algorithms to suppress noise, echo and eliminate receiver-to-microphone acoustic feedback.
The advent of cellular phones has accentuated many problems for the hearing impaired people wearing one of the Hearing-aids in or behind the ear, although some of these problems also exist with landline telephones. The electromagnetic interferences between the cellular phone and the “Hearing-aid” when they are in close distance cause superfluous noises, in addition to the physical encumbrance caused by placing the cell-phone over or close to the Hearing-aid. Several solutions to these problems have been devised, including the use of inductive communication between the cell-phone and the Hearing aid device through the use of telecoils, and shielding the cellphones in order to reduce the causes of interferences. However to the best of our knowledge no radical solution to the hearing impaired people using cellular phones has been suggested nor implemented. In this invention we are suggesting that all incoming calls should already include the correction that otherwise would have been made by the “Hearing-aid”, thus avoiding the use of the hearing aid when taking a call.
The emerging G.722 standard enabling 50 Hz to 7 kHz wideband voice communication will soon be used in Voice over IP (for example in SKYPE), Internet (IP) and Cellular Communications. Implementing the G.722 standard in Public Switched Telephone Networks will replace the current narrow band (200 Hz to 3400 Hz) with wideband (50 Hz-7 kHz) telephony and enable to introduce the wideband personal hearing correction over landline telephony.
The advent of video-phones improved the intelligibility of a conversation by providing to the parties additional cues, such as lips reading and facial expressions that add to the audio message and lets the brain to combine all signals and optimize understanding.
In this invention we add two additional improvements to the intelligibility of audio communications, adapting the Hearing spectral response of one party to the spectral speech intonations of the other party and “dilation” of syllables on account of “pauses” between syllables.